Abstract

A method of associating a given text document with relevant structured data is disclosed. The method receives as inputs a text document, and structured data in the form of a relational database. The method then identifies terms in the text document, and searches and queries the structured data using the terms to identify fragments of the structured data that are relevant to the document. Finally, the text document and the identified fragments of structured data are output to a user.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a Continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 11/530,104 filed Sep. 8, 2006, the complete disclosure of which, in its entirety, is herein incorporated by reference.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to information extraction and, in particular, to discovering entities hidden in a given document with respect to a given relational database.

BACKGROUND

Faced with growing knowledge management needs, enterprises are increasingly realizing the importance of seamlessly integrating, or interlinking, critical business information distributed across structured and unstructured data sources. However, in a typical enterprise environment, the structured data is managed by the database system and the unstructured data is managed by the content manager creating an artificial separation between the two. This separation is unfortunate since the information contents of these two data sources are complementary and related. Interlinking the unstructured documents with related structured data enables consolidated analysis of information spread across the two sources.

Prior work on information extraction has dealt with the issue of discovering real world entities pertaining to a given document. Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems focus on the task of identifying sequences of terms within a document as named-entities such as person name, location and company name. Such systems employ natural language processing techniques and use dictionaries for performing the above task. However, these solutions are prone to an element of uncertainty, since entities are not well defined. Moreover, only entities that are explicitly mentioned in the document may be identified by these approaches.

Conventionally, the structured data is accessed via a precise query interface, such as using a Structured Query Language (SQL) and unstructured data is accessed through keyword search. Recent work on information integration have proposed keyword search over structured data. In this solution, the input is a set of keywords and the goal is to identify sets of related tuples from the structured data that contain one or more of the keywords. This body of work deals with plain keyword search over structured data. Such solutions do not address the problem of discovering fragments of structured data related to a text document.

A need therefore exists for an improved system that is able discover entities within structured data that are related to a given text document. The system strives to provide a unified view of unstructured and structured data and enables consolidated analysis and information retrieval across the two sources.

SUMMARY

It is an object of the present invention to substantially overcome, or at least ameliorate, one or more disadvantages of existing arrangements.

According to an aspect of the invention a method of associating a given text document with relevant structured data is disclosed. The method receives as inputs a text document, and structured data in the form of a relational database.

The method then identifies terms in the text document, and searches and queries the structured data using the terms to identify fragments of the structured data that are relevant to the document. Finally, the text document and the identified fragments of structured data are output to a user.

Other aspects of the invention are also disclosed.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

One or more embodiments of the present invention will now be described with reference to the drawings, in which:

FIG. 1 shows a schematic block diagram including a system for linking a given text document with relevant structured data according to the present disclosure;

FIG. 2 shows a schematic flow diagram of a method performed by the system shown in FIG. 1;

FIG. 3A shows an example report from a patient used to illustrate the operation of the system shown in FIG. 1;

FIG. 3B shows an example schema of structure data;

FIG. 3C shows an example entity template corresponding to the schema in shown in FIG. 3B;

FIG. 4 shows another example of an entity template;

FIG. 5 shows a schematic block diagram of a general purpose computer upon which arrangements described can be practiced;

Disclosed is a system 100 and a method 200 for linking a given text document with relevant structured data. FIG. 1 shows a schematic block diagram including the system 100 according to the present disclosure. The system 100 receives as input a text document 110, and structured data 120. The structured data 120 is in a relational database. The structured data 120 is viewed as a set of predefined entities and associated context information.

An entity is a “thing” of significance, either real or conceptual, about which the relational database 120 holds information. An entity template 130, also received by the system 100, specifies (a) the entities to be matched in the document 110 and (b) the context information that can be exploited to perform the match.

The system 100 identifies the entities (from the set of entities specified by the entity template 130) that best match the document 110 and further finds embeddings of these entities in the document. The embedding of each entity provides a set of segments within the document 110 that are related to the entity. The system 100 outputs the document 110 associated with the identified entities and their embeddings.

As an example, consider a retail organization where the structured data consists of all information about sales transactions, customers and products. An example schema of the relational database of the organization is shown in FIG. 4. The organization, with a network of multiple stores, has a steady inflow of complaints into a centralized complaint repository. These complaints are accepted using alternative means, such as a web-form, email, fax and voice-mail (which is then transcripted). Each such complaint is typically a free-flow narrative text about one or more sales transactions, and is not guaranteed to contain the respective transaction identifiers. Instead, each complaint may divulge, by way of context, limited information such as the store name, a partial list of items bought, the purchase dates, etc. Using this limited information, the system 100 discovers the potential matches with the transactions present in the sales transactions database and associates the given complaint with the matching transactions.

Such linkage provides actionable context to a typically fuzzy, free flow narrative which can be profitably exploited in a variety of ways:

In the above example, an automated complaint routing system may be built. Given that the transaction is automatically linked with the complaint, such an automated complaint routing system retrieves from the relational database additional information about the transaction (such as type and value of the items purchased, specific promotions availed and the customer's loyalty level), and routes the complaint to an appropriate department or customer service representative based on the same.

Consider a collection of complaints that have been linked to the respective transactions in the relational database. This association can be exploited in On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) to derive useful information, such as regions or product categories that have shown a recent upsurge in complaints.

The system 100, in order to find the best annotation, makes use of entity templates 130 provided by a domain expert or a user. An entity template 130 specifies (a) the entities to be matched in the document 110 and (b) the context information that can be exploited to perform the match.

Formally, an entity template 130 is a rooted tree with a designated root node. Each node in the rooted tree is labelled with a table in the schema of the given relational database 120, and there exists an edge in the tree only if the tables labelling the nodes at the two ends of the edge have a foreign-key relationship in the database schema. The table that labels the root node is called the pivot table of the entity template 130, and the tables that label the other nodes are called the context tables. Each row in the pivot table is identified as an entity belonging to the template 130, with the associated context information consisting of the rows in the context tables that have a path to that row in the pivot table through one or more foreign-keys covered by the edges in the entity template 130.

In order to illustrate the above, consider the entity template shown in FIG. 4. The entity template, which is a sales transactions entity template, has its root node labelled by a TRANSACTION table (the pivot table), and its non-root nodes labelled by CUSTOMER, STORE, TRANSPROD, PRODUCT and MANUFACTURER tables (the context tables) that provide the context for each transaction in the TRANSACTION table. Note that the template definition also provides the information that the SUPPLIER table, though reachable from the TRANSACTION table via both the PRODUCT and STORE tables, carries no contextual information about a given transaction.

Multiple nodes in the template may be labelled with the same table. This is needed to differentiate the different roles a table might play in the context of the entity. Suppose the document 110 mentions product names not only to identify a transaction, but also to identify the store in which the transaction occurred. Further, suppose the document 110 mentions the manufacturer in the former case, but not in the latter. Then, the template in FIG. 4 would extend the TRANSACTION→STORE path to TRANSACTION→STORE→INVENTORY→PRODUCT. As a result there exist two nodes in the template labelled with the same table PRODUCT representing the two roles the table plays. Also, one node includes a child labelled with the table MANUFACTURER, the other node does not.

In the examples presented below only a single entity template is defined. This is only for ease of exposition as the system 100 may be implemented using a collection of entity templates 130.

The system 100 takes as input a text document 110, the database 120 and template 130. A set of entities along with their embedding is referred as an annotation. The system 100 uses a scoring function to measure the relevance of any given annotation to the document 110. The system 100 computes the annotation having the maximum score and outputs the document 110 associated with this annotation. The system 100 employs the method 200 for accomplishing the above task of finding the best annotation. FIG. 2 shows a schematic flow diagram of the method 200.

The method 200 starts in step 210 by parsing the text document 110. The system 100 uses a part-of-speech parser for identifying noun-phrases in the document 110 and filters out the rest of the words. The assumption, which usually holds, is that only nouns appear as values in the database 120. The identified noun-phrases are referred to as terms.

The system 100 maintains a context cache 280 that contains relationships of the form (e,t) meaning that the term t is contained in the context of the entity e. The system 100 starts with an empty cache.

In step 220 the system 100 analyzes the terms and the current contents of the context cache 280 and identifies a query that needs to be evaluated next. The query can be of two forms: (a) a term t; (b) an entity e. The goal of query (a) is to identify all the entities that contain the term t in their context, whereas query (b) asks for all terms contained in the context of the entity e.

Given the query identified in step 220, step 230 then evaluates the query using the database management system's query processing capability. Further, for queries of the form (a), a database search tool is also employed.

Step 240 updates the contents of the cache with the query result obtained in step 230.

Step 250 analyzes the contents of the cache and the document 110, and computes an annotation of the document that is the best with respect to the current contents of the cache.

Step 260 checks whether the annotation found in step 250 is the best annotation possible for the document 110. If so, the annotation is output to the user and the system 100 halts. If the current annotation is not the best annotation for the document 110 then the method 200 returns to step 220 from where steps 220 to 260 are repeated until the best annotation for the document 110 is found.

The method 200 is described in more detail below. The particular definition of annotation as used in the system 100 is described first. Next an example scoring function employed in system 100 for measuring the relevance of an annotation to the document 110 is described. Then the details of the method 200 are discussed.

The system 100 views the document 110 as a sequence of sentences, where each sentence is a collection of terms.

The preferred scoring mechanism is based on the well-known notion of inverse document frequency (IDF).

The weight of a term t is preferably defined as:

w(t)={log(N/n(t))ifn(t)>00otherwise

where N is the total number of distinct entities in the relational database 120, and n(t) is the number of distinct entities that contain term t in their context.

A segment is a sequence of one or more consecutive sentences in the document 110. In order to score a given document segment d with respect to a given entity e, let T(d) denote the set of terms that appear in the segment d, and let T(e)⊂T(d) denote the set of such terms that appear in the context of entity e as well. Then, the score of the entity e with respect to the segment d is defined as:

score(e,d)=∑t∈T(e)tf(t,d).w(t)

where tf(t,d) is the number of times the term t appears in the segment d, and w(t) is the weight of the term t as defined in Equation (1).

Given input (a) a text document D (110), (b) a relational database 120, and (c) an entity template 130 that interprets the database as a set of entities E, annotations are defined as follows. An annotation is defined as a pair (F,B), where F⊂E is a set of entities and B is an embedding of F in document D, i.e. a function that maps each entity eεF to a non-empty set of segments B(e) in document D such that the following property is satisfied: no two segments in S(F,B) overlap, where S(F,B) denotes the set of all segments included in the annotation (F,B), i.e. S(F,B)=∪eεFB(e).

The system 100 defines the score of an annotation (F,B) as:

score(F,B)=∑e∈F∑d∈B(e)(score(e,d)-λ)

where score(e,d) is as defined in Equation (2) and λ≧0 is a tuneable parameter that biases the score in favor of annotations with fewer segments.

System 100 outputs the annotation with the maximum score among all annotations of the document D. The system 100 accomplishes this task by using the method 200. A detailed description of the method 200 is presented below.

A naive algorithm for finding the best annotation is to enumerate all annotations, and pick the annotation that has the maximum score. This is clearly impractical since the number of possible annotations is exponential in the number of candidate entities as well as in the number of sentences in the document. The system 100 solves this problem efficiently by effectively pruning and transforming the search space. At the core of this solution lie the following two assertions:

Assertion 1. For each annotation (F,B), there exists an annotation (F′,B′) such that the segments in S(F′,B′) form a partition (i.e. a set of non-overlapping segments that cover each sentence in the document) of the document D and score(F′,B′)≧score(F,B).

Assertion 2. Let (F*,B*) be the annotation with the maximum score among all annotations of document D. Then, for each eεF* and dεB*(e), score(e,d)≧score(e′,d) for all e′εE.

For 1≦j≦i≦|D|, let Dji denote the segment of the segment that starts at sentence j and ends at sentence i (inclusive of the two sentences). Let (Fi, Bi) be the annotation of D1i having the maximum score.

Assertion 3. For each i, 1≦i≦|D|, the score for (Fi,Bi) can be recursively expressed as score(Fi,Bi)=max0≦k<i{score(Fk,Bk)+maxeεEscore(e,D(k+1)i)−λ}, where |D| denotes the number of sentences in the document D.

The recursive relationship stated in assertion 3 suggests a dynamic programming algorithm for finding (F|D|,B|D|), the annotation of document D with the maximum score. This annotation, as stated in assertions 1 and 2, is actually an annotation with the maximum score overall. A top-down memorization-based version is used, the pseudocode of which appears in FIG. 6.

The time complexity of the proposed algorithm shown in FIG. 6 is quadratic in the number of sentences in the document. This can be reduced to linear by limiting the size of the segments considered to be at most L sentences by changing the lower bound of k in Line B03 from 0 to max(0, i−L)). However, this efficient algorithm is not enough to make the solution scalable.

Finding the entity in E that best matches a given segment (Line B05) involves a search (rather than a simple lookup) on the database. This is an expensive operation for nontrivial database sizes, and performing it for every segment in the document is clearly a performance bottleneck.

The system 100 uses a refinement of the algorithm shown in FIG. 6 to resolve this performance bottleneck. The refined algorithm begins with no apriori information about the entities, and then successively queries the database to incrementally populate a cache, called context cache, of partial contexts of only the potentially matching entities as it converges to the final solution. At each step, the search for best matching entities is carried out using only the information in the cache at that step. This can be performed efficiently in-memory. The result is a strategy that keeps the amount of information retrieved from the database in course of the execution of the algorithm at a minimum.

The context cache maintains a set of entities EC⊂E, a set of terms TC⊂T(D) (where T(D) is the set of terms in the document), and the following interrelations:

For each entity eεEC, a set TC(e)⊂TC of terms from the context of entity e in the database. Let TC(e)=φ for each eεE−EC.

For each term tεTC, a set EC(t)⊂EC of entities that contain term t in their context. Let EC(t)=φ for each tεT(D)−TC.

The context cache is populated with additional data using any of the following two operations.

GetEntitySet. Given a term tεTC, query the database to extract all the entities that contain term t in their context. This set is inserted in the cache as EC(t). Further, for each entity eεEC(t), the set TC(e) is updated to include the term t if not already present.

GetTermSet. Given an entity eεEC, query the database to extract the set of all the terms in document D that exist in the context of that entity e. This set is inserted in the cache as TC(e). Further, for each term tεTC(e), the set EC(t) is updated to include the entity e if not already present.

Both these operations are expensive. GetEntitySet involves (a) identifying the rows containing the term t across all tables labelling the nodes in the entity e, and (b) identifying the rows in the pivot table that have a join path (along the edges in the entity template) to any of the identified rows. Step (a) is performed using a text index over the tables in the database, while step (b) involves a union of multiple join queries, one for each node whose labelling table contains a row that contains the term t. The system 100 preferably exploits IBM's DB2 Net Search Extender for combined execution of both steps in a single query. Computing the context of an entity in GetTermSet, on the other hand, involves a join query based on the entity template. However, in the presence of a nested substructure, it is sometimes more efficient to retrieve the context using an outer-union query. Such are well-known in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) literature.

In order to bound the matching scores, consider a document segment d and let T(d) be the set of terms in document d. Further, let E′C denote the set of entities for which GetTermSet has been invoked so far, and let T′C denote the set of terms for which GetEntitySet has been invoked so far.

Then, for an entity eεE, it is known that its context contains the terms in TC(e), but does not contain any of the terms in (T′C−TC(e)).

Now, consider the remaining terms in T(d), given by R(e,d)=T(d)−(T′C∪TC(e)). If eεE′C, so that TC(e) contains the complete context of entity e obtained using GetTermSet, then it is further known that the context of entity e does not contain any of these terms as well. On the other hand, for the remaining entities eεE−E′C, there does not exist enough information to decide whether the context of entity e does or does not contain any of these terms. It is assumed that the entity e does not contain any of these terms to obtain a lower bound on score(e,d), and assumed that the entity e does contain of these terms to obtain an upper bound.

Accordingly, given an entity eεE and a segment d in document D, we compute the score lower-bound of entity e with respect to segment d by excluding the terms in the remaining terms R(e,d), i.e.:

scoreC-(e,d)=∑t∈TC(e)tf(t,d).w(t)

and, the score upper-bound of entity e with respect to segment d by including the terms in the remaining terms R(e,d), i.e.:

The bounds on score(e,d) for eεE and segment d in document D derived above are further be used to derive a lower-bound scoreC−(F,B) and an upper-bound scoreC+(F,B) for a given annotation (F,B) of document D. These bounds follow from the definition of score(F,B) as follows:

The slack of the annotation (F,B) is derived as slackC(F,B)=scoreC+(F,B)−scoreC−(F,B). Let the slack of the entity e with respect to segment d further be defined as slackC(e,d)=scoreC+(e,d)−scoreC−(e,d). Since slackC(e,d)=0 for each entity eεE′C, it follows that:

slackC(F,B)=∑e∈F-EC′∑d∈B(e)slackC(e,d)

In view of the foregoing, the algorithm that computes the best annotation (F*,B*) of a given document D presented in FIG. 6 may be refined. In particular, Lines B05 and B06 of the procedure BestSegAnnot in FIG. 6 has been adapted to invoke the score upper-bound function scoreC+(e,d) instead of the exact score(e,d). Let the adapted procedure be called BestSegAnnotC.

Let ( F, B) be the annotation returned by the procedure BestSegAnnotC. The following assertion 4 is then made:

scoreC−(F, B)≦score(F*,B*)≦scoreC+(F, B)

The cache content is iteratively improved so that the gap between the scores of the optimum annotation ( F, B) determined by the procedure BestSegAnnotC and the annotation (F*,B*) decreases monotonically. Suppose a cache update strategy is chosen that, at each step, (a) decreases scoreC+( F, B) for all but a finite number of steps, and (b) ensures that slackC(F,B) does not increase for any annotation (F,B) that could be returned by the procedure BestSegAnnotC in the future. Then, since the total number of possible annotations are finite, the revised algorithm is bound to reach a stage when the procedure BestSegAnnotC determine an annotation ( F, B) such that slackC( F, B)=0, at which point the revised algorithm may terminate because, according to assertion 4, ( F, B) would then be the overall optimal annotation.

The resulting procedure, called BestAnnotIncr is shown in FIG. 7. Starting with an empty cache, the procedure BestAnnotIncr repeatedly calls the procedure BestAnnotC, which computes a best matching annotation ( F, B) based on the current cache, and then calls a subroutine UpdateCache described below, that updates the cache using the best matching annotation ( F, B). The procedure BestAnnotIncr terminates whenever it is found that the best annotation ( F, B) returned by the modified procedure BestAnnot has slackC( F, B)=0.

Since score+(e,d) is computed in-memory based on the contents in the context-cache, each invocation to the procedure BestAnnotC is executed efficiently. In fact, since score+(e,d) for most segments d and entities e remains the same between successive invocations of the procedure BestAnnotC, the system 100 actually uses lazy, incremental techniques to compute the successive best annotations efficiently.

The heuristic strategy used in system 100 for choosing the update to perform on the cache at a given iteration in the revised best annotation algorithm (cf. Line C04 in FIG. 7) is next described. Let the best annotation determined by the procedure BestAnnotC on the current cache contents be ( F, B). By definition of BestAnnotC, ( F, B)=argmax(F,B)scoreC+(F,B). Let the corresponding score upper bound be s0=scoreC+( F, B). After the cache has been updated, let s1 be the new score upper-bound for ( F, B).

The system 100 operates by heuristically choosing an update that tries to maximize (s0−s1), the decrease in scoreC+( F, B). This is achieved by growing the cache using GetEntitySet(t) or GetTermSet(e) for an appropriate term tε/T′C or entity eε/E′C. Since (a) s1<s0, and (b) growing the cache can only decrease the slack for an annotation, the two conditions mentioned above for guaranteeing termination of the algorithm are satisfied.

The maximum decrease in scoreC+( F, B) is bound by slackC( F, B). Consider a segment d in ( F, B). Since ( F, B) is a canonical annotation, segment d must be associated with a unique entity e=arg maxe′εEC scoreC+(e′,d). The contribution of this segment d to slackC( F, B), is thus slackC(e,d). Let d be the segment in ( F, B) with the largest contribution to slackC( F, B) and ē be the entity associated with segment d. The system 100 tries to achieve the goal of decreasing scoreC+( F, B) by greedily choosing to decrease scoreC+(ē, d) instead.

There are two alternatives for updating the cache. The first, called GES, invokes GetEntitySet(t) for a carefully identified term tεT( d), and the other, called GTS, invokes GetTermSet(e) for a carefully identified entity eεEC. Each is explored in turn and the term t and entity e respectively that lead to the maximum decrease in scoreC+(ē, d) are identified.

GES. As already stated, slackC(ē, d)=scoreC+(ē, d)−

scoreC-(e_,d_)=∑t∈R(e_,d_)tf(t,d_).w(t),

where R(ē, d) is the set of terms in segment d that may or may not belong to the context of ē. Let t be the term in set R(ē, d) with the highest contribution to slackC(ē, d), i.e. t=arg maxtεR(ē, d)tf(t, d)·w(t). In the computation of scoreC+(ē, d) before the update, term t is assumed to be in the context of entity ē. If the cache is updated by invoking GetEntitySet( t), and it is found that term t is actually not in the context of entity ē, then it would lead to the largest decrease in scoreC+(ē, d) possible by invoking GetEntitySet(t) on any term t. The operation GES thus involves invoking GetEntitySet( t).

GTS. Since the scoreC+(ē, d) has the be decreased through choosing entity ē, the operation GTS invokes GetTermSet(ē). The maximum decrease in scoreC+(ē, d) obtained using GES is tf( t, d)·w( t), and slackC(ē, d) using GTS. Since the latter is always the larger of the two, this seems to suggest that GTS should always be invoked in preference to GES. This is misleading.

Let the cache be called complete with respect to a segment d if all potentially best matching entities for segment d are present in EC. If the cache is not complete with respect to segment d it may not yet know about the entity that is actually a best match for segment d, and therefore invoking GTS on segment d does not help.

At each step, the system 100 therefore checks whether the cache is complete with respect to the identified segment d. If the condition is true, the system 100 invokes GTS, otherwise the system 100 invokes GES. The challenge in implementing this strategy lies in checking whether the cache is complete. The following assertion 5 provides a simple solution.

Assertion 5. Let d be a segment and let eεEC be its associated entity in the annotation ( F, B), i.e. e=arg maxe′εEC scoreC+(e′,d). If

∑t∈T(d)-TC′tf(t,d).w(t)<scoreC-(e,d),

then the cache is complete with respect to segment d.

The pseudocode for a cache update procedure UpdateCache is shown in FIG. 8. The system 100 may also implement an alternative version of the procedure UpdateCache that batches all executions of GES together. On its first call, this version of the procedure UpdateCache keeps invoking GES on segment d until the cache becomes complete with respect to segment d, and in all subsequent calls invokes GTS.

The system 100 and the method 200 performed therein is further illustrated by means of an example relating to hospitals. The system 100 receives as input a text document, such as the report shown in FIG. 3A from a patient that talks about various symptoms suffered by the patient. The report includes other information, such as the city where he/she lives.

The schema of the structure data, which contains information about various diseases, their symptoms, doctors and diseases treated by each doctor, is shown in FIG. 3B. An edge represents a foreign key to primary key relationship. The attribute “ArticleLink” in the Diseases table 310 contain a link to an article discussing the particular disease.

Entity templates are defined by a user or a domain expert. The entity template for the present example is shown in FIG. 3C. The relation “Diseases” is the pivot of the entity template, meaning that possible diseases related to the input document are to be identified.

The goal of the system 100 is to process the input text document (FIG. 3A) and to identity possible diseases suffered by the patient. Having received the input, the system 100 parses the text document, and by ignoring uninteresting words, identifies a list of terms. For example, from the segment of the input text document “ . . . Pain worsens on exercise. Nowadays, even my daily morning walk results in shortness of breath and at the end I feel like fainting . . . ” the terms identified are: pain; worsens; exercise; morning; walk; results; shortness; breath; fainting.

Based on the identified terms, the system 100 employs the above described method 200 to find the diseases that are most relevant to the document and their embeddings in the documents. The results are returned to the user.

In summary, the system 100 of the present disclosure addresses the problem of associating the relevant structured data 120 with the input text document 110 by discovering the entities hidden in the document 110 with the help of the structured data 120. The system 100 uses partial information present in the input document 110 (in the form of terms present in the document 110) to discover entities in the structured database 120 that pertain to the document 110.

The system 100 is able to identify an entity in the given text document 110 even if that entity is not explicitly mentioned in the document 110 because the system 100 exploits the available context information to match and identify the entities. The terms in the text document 110 matching an entity may be arbitrarily spread out in the document 110. In the course of identifying the best matching entities, multiple terms across the document 110 are identified as belonging to the same entity. It is noted that the number of entities present in the document 110, or their relative order, is not known beforehand.

The system 100 for linking a given text document with relevant structured data may be practiced using a general-purpose computer system 800, such as that shown in FIG. 5 wherein the processes within system 100 are implemented as software, such as an application program executing within the computer system 800. The software may be stored in a computer readable medium. The software is loaded into the computer system 800 from the computer readable medium, and then executed by the computer system 800. A computer readable medium having such software or computer program recorded on it is a computer program product.

The computer system 800 is formed by a computer module 801, input devices such as a keyboard 802, output devices including a display device 814. The computer module 801 typically includes at least one processor unit 805, and a memory unit 806. The module 801 also includes a number of input/output (I/O) interfaces including a video interface 807 that couples to the display device 814, and an I/O interface 813 for the keyboard 802. A storage device 809 is provided and typically includes at least a hard disk drive and a CD-ROM drive. The components 805 to 813 of the computer module 801 typically communicate via an interconnected bus 804 and in a manner which results in a conventional mode of operation of the computer system 800 known to those in the relevant art.

Typically, the application program is resident on the storage device 809 and read and controlled in its execution by the processor 805. In some instances, the application program may be supplied to the user encoded on a CD-ROM or floppy disk and read via a corresponding drive, or alternatively may be read by the user from a network via a modem device. Still further, the software can also be loaded into the computer system 800 from other computer readable media. The term “computer readable medium” as used herein refers to any storage medium that participates in providing instructions and/or data to the computer system 800 for execution and/or processing.

The foregoing describes only some embodiments of the present invention, and modifications and/or changes can be made thereto without departing from the scope and spirit of the invention, the embodiments being illustrative and not restrictive.

Claims (15)

1. A computer-implemented method of associating a text document with relevant structured data, said method comprising:

receiving, by a computer, a text document;

receiving, by said computer, structured data in the form of entities from a relational database;

simultaneously identifying, by said computer, segments in said text document related to said entities in said structured data, and linking each identified segment in said text document with a most relevant entity in said structured data; and

outputting, by said computer, said identified segments of said text document and associated entities in said structured data.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein said simultaneously identifying segments and linking said each identified segment comprises:

identifying a set of entities from said relational database;

identifying context information associated with each of said set of entities;

parsing said text document to identify a set of terms, where each of said set of terms is a noun phrase found in a segment including context information from said text document; and

searching and querying said structured data based on said identified set of terms to find an annotation that, based upon a predefined criterion, has a best score among all annotations, where an annotation consists of a set of entities, non-overlapping segments of said text document, and assignment of an entity in said set of entities to each segment.

3. The method according to claim 2, wherein said searching and querying said structured data comprises:

calculating a score according to said predefined criterion for each annotation, wherein said score is based on said terms found in said segments and said terms contained in said context information for said entity associated with said segments in the annotation; and

finding said annotation with a maximum score.

4. The method according to claim 2, wherein identifying a set of entities and identifying context information comprise:

receiving one or more entity templates, where each entity template is a rooted tree with a designated root node, each node in said rooted tree is labeled with a table from said relational database, an edge linking two nodes exists when said tables labeling each of said two linked nodes have a foreign-key relationship in a relational schema of said relational database, each tuple in said relational schema labeling said root node of any template constitutes an entity, and for an entity in an entity template, said context information of said entity consists of said tuples that have a path to said entity through one or more foreign-keys covered by said entity template.

5. The method according to claim 3, wherein finding said annotation with said maximum score comprises:

maintaining a context cache comprising containment relationships between entities and terms, where each containment relationship is an entity-term pair such that said term is contained in said context information of said entity;

based on said containment relationships present in said context cache, issuing a query to said relational database based on contents of said context cache to identify further containment relationships between said entities and said terms;

updating said context cache with results from said query;

finding a current best annotation based on said context cache; and

repeating: issuing a query, updating said context cache, and finding a current best annotation, until said annotation having said maximum score is found.

6. A method of associating a text document with relevant structured data comprising:

receiving, using a computer, a text document;

receiving, using said computer, structured data in the form of entities from a relational database;

simultaneously, using said computer, identifying segments in said text document related to said entities in said structured data, and linking each identified segment in said text document with a most relevant entity in said structured data; and

outputting, using said computer, said identified segments of said text document and associated entities in said structured data.

7. The method according to claim 6, wherein said simultaneously identifying segments and linking said each identified segment of said method comprises:

identifying a set of entities from said relational database;

identifying context information associated with each of said set of entities;

parsing said text document to identify a set of terms, where each of said set of terms is a noun phrase found in a segment including context information from said text document; and

searching and querying said structured data based on said identified set of terms to find an annotation that, based upon a predefined criterion, has a best score among all annotations, where an annotation consists of a set of entities, non-overlapping segments of said text document, and assignment of an entity in said set of entities to each segment.

8. The method according to claim 7, wherein said searching and querying said structured data of said method comprises:

calculating a score according to said predefined criterion for each annotation, wherein said score is based on said terms found in said segments and said terms contained in said context information for said entity associated with said segments in the annotation; and

finding said annotation with a maximum score.

9. The method according to claim 8, wherein finding said annotation with said maximum score of said method comprises:

maintaining a context cache comprising containment relationships between entities and terms, where each containment relationship is an entity-term pair such that said term is contained in said context information of said entity;

based on said containment relationships present in said context cache, issuing a query to said relational database based on contents of said context cache to identify further containment relationships between said entities and said terms;

updating said context cache with results from said query;

finding a current best annotation based on said context cache; and

repeating: issuing a query, updating said context cache, and finding a current best annotation, until said annotation having said maximum score is found.

10. The method according to claim 7, wherein identifying a set of entities and identifying context information of the method comprises:

receiving one or more entity templates, where each entity template is a rooted tree with a designated root node, each node in said rooted tree is labeled with a table from said relational database, an edge linking two nodes exists when said tables labeling each of said two linked nodes have a foreign-key relationship in a relational schema of said relational database, each tuple in said relational schema labeling said root node of any template constitutes an entity, and for an entity in an entity template, said context information of said entity consists of said tuples that have a path to said entity through one or more foreign-keys covered by said entity template.

11. A computer-implemented method of partitioning a text document into segments with respect to structured data, said method comprising:

receiving, by a computer, said text document;

receiving, by said computer, said structured data from a relational database;

identifying, by said computer, terms in said text document;

identifying, by said computer, a set of entities from said relational database;

receiving, by said computer, context information, comprising said terms, associated with said set of entities;

identifying, by said computer, said entities that are most relevant to segments within said text document by using said context information and said terms in said text document;

finding, by said computer, an annotation that is most relevant to said text document among all annotations, where an annotation consists of a set of entities, non-overlapping segments of said text document, and assignment of an entity in said set of entities to each segment; and

outputting, by said computer, said segments of said text document and said identified entities that partition said text document.

12. The method according to claim 11, further comprising:

said simultaneously identifying segments and linking said each identified segment comprises:

identifying a set of entities from said relational database;

identifying context information associated with each of said set of entities;

parsing said text document to identify a set of terms, where each of said set of terms is a noun phrase found in a segment including context information from said text document; and

searching and querying said structured data based on said identified set of terms to find an annotation that, based upon a predefined criterion, has a best score among all annotations, where an annotation consists of a set of entities, non-overlapping segments of said text document, and assignment of an entity in said set of entities to each segment.

13. The method according to claim 11, wherein said searching and querying said structured data comprises:

calculating a score according to said predefined criterion for each annotation, wherein said score is based on said terms found in said segments and said terms contained in said context information for said entity associated with said segments in the annotation; and

finding said annotation with a maximum score.

14. The method according to claim 11, wherein identifying a set of entities and identifying context information comprise:

receiving one or more entity templates, where each entity template is a rooted tree with a designated root node, each node in said rooted tree is labeled with a table from said relational database, an edge linking two nodes exists when said tables labeling each of said two linked nodes have a foreign-key relationship in a relational schema of said relational database, each tuple in said relational schema labeling said root node of any template constitutes an entity, and for an entity in an entity template, said context information of said entity consists of said tuples that have a path to said entity through one or more foreign-keys covered by said entity template.

15. The method according to claim 11, wherein finding said annotation with said maximum score comprises:

maintaining a context cache comprising containment relationships between entities and terms, where each containment relationship is an entity-term pair such that said term is contained in said context information of said entity;

based on said containment relationships present in said context cache, issuing a query to said relational database based on contents of said context cache to identify further containment relationships between said entities and said terms;

updating said context cache with results from said query;

finding a current best annotation based on said context cache; and

repeating: issuing a query, updating said context cache, and finding a current best annotation, until said annotation having said maximum score is found.